Customer Reviews

Succession Planting for Year-round Pleasure

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Succession Planting for Year-round Pleasure is a fantastic book by Christopher Lloyd, who has previously written quite a few, which are also excellent. The photos are among the most beautiful I have ever seen, and I give this book my highest honors. But perhaps it deserves some demerit on the grounds of impracticality or even depressing unattainability.

For one thing, Lloyd's long border at his estate at Great Dixter is 200 feet by 15 feet, so many of the effects which he finds practical are not possible in any garden likely to be owned by the bourgeoisie. Further, he gardens in England in perhaps the equivalent to Zone 8. Despite this, he is always looking to push the limits of hardiness with exotic plants. And outside of Britain and coastal Oregon and Washington, there is virtually nowhere in the English-speaking world where the winters are so mild, and yet the summers are not too hot for many of his plants.

So taken altogether, in any combination of 3 plants you might consider, it's a safe bet that 1 of them either can't be grown in your location, or will require extraordinary levels of coddling to get through the winter. At some level there's nothing wrong with that; who hasn't at least considered growing Dahlias or Gladioli, which must be dug up, but can then be stored in most basements? However, his planting schemes are more labor intensive than this. The semi-hardy and tropical plants he loves must be dug up, or have cuttings taken, and many are wintered under glass; to do this for all of his many varied plants, he apparently has at least 3 different temperatures in his greenhouses or cold frames.

Normal (i.e., not superhuman) gardeners use biennials and short-lived perennials (the ones which seed themselves to death) such as Lupines, many Dianthus, Digitalis (foxglove) and Lychnis coronaria, as relatively easy self-sowers, performing enough dead-heading to keep seedlings to a modest level, and hopefully to keep the mother plant alive as well. For Lloyd and his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, the chosen method for all of these but the Lychnis (rose campion) is generally to sow seeds in summer, pot them up and put in a cold frame in October, bed out the next April or May, then rip out the plants as soon as their blooms have faded. Naturally his Lupines make mine look diseased. Damn him to hell and all that. For fuzzy-leaved Verbascums, which he winters in their final positions, he actually suspends a plate of glass over their crowns to keep them dry so they don't rot!

All that said, his plant combinations are exquisite, and many of them are obtainable by most gardeners in temperate climates. More important, the principles he espouses, the color combinations, and the methods of succession among broad types of plants, are all transferable to less intensive methods, or to other plants which are more practical for your situation. Further, I defy anyone to read this book without discovering several new plants he will plan to try out. I am made newly aware especially of several with true- and deep-blue flowers. Buy or borrow this book, but also consider his older books, "The Adventurous Gardener" and "The Well-Tempered Garden." They have essentially no illustrations, but a wealth of cultural information and design ideas and critiques of many plants and cultivars.

This is a beautiful, and beautifully made book, and has many interesting ideas, not the least of which is how to think about the beauty of "off-season" plantings. I'm thinking about the colors of shrubbery stems in the winter in a way I didn't before.

That being said, if I'd known that the author had inherited a generations-old garden and worked on it all his life, full-time, in Sussex, England, I probably would not have bought the book. There's no mention of the cost of a garden like his (400 years of compost), no awareness that some people can't garden full time, and no thought given to other climates or sizes or types of terrain. For him, a border is going to be 15 feet wide--for me, that's half my yard. And about half the plants he recommends highly simply will not grow where I live.

To be fair, this information was available in the listing--buried in the back link to Editorial Reviews, half-way down, or if one clicked on Look Inside and then read the back flap. Since this is a highly local gardening book, I would have liked to see that information front and center.

I will probably use a few of these ideas, and as I said, the book is a pleasure to look at and read. It's just not the content I expected or wanted.

Normally I don't get into gardening books...I'm a sucker for the pictures, but find the text boring.

This book however has been so fun to read -- and, yes the pictures are beautiful. It helps create a garden for each season, and it shows photos from the same garden each season. I've just planted based on some ideas in this book, so I guess I'll need to report back how it works out.

What an inspirational, fun and delicious book by Mr. Lloyd. Just a wonderful go-to book to get the most out of each growing season. I own every book Christopher Lloyd has ever written, and I find myself picking this one up the most. Buy this and enjoy!!!!

This is a great balance of fantastic full-page photos and invaluable information. The text is insightful without being stuffy, and the photos are fantastic. Easily approachable as a book to read cover to cover or pick up for a few minutes of inspiration. Fantastic buy.